New eagle licensing -> goodbye Eagle

On 18/07/14 22:01, Simon Gornall wrote:

So, I've used Eagle now for over 10 years. In all that time I've always

upgraded to the latest version, but that's just stopped.

 

I have multiple computers, and I use multiple locations. I've always

only ever used one instance of Eagle at a time, and I've never given the

license details to anyone else. Unfortunately, the latest way in which

Eagle is licensed is way too restrictive for me to work with the product

as I have done for over a decade now.

I absolutely agree. Part of the reason I picked EAGLE was because of the

relatively liberal licensing policy. "Install on as many PCs as you

like, as long as they all belong to you personally and only one PC is

running EAGLE at a time". Great!

The reason I switched to EAGLE in the first place was a competitor

product which employed node-locked licensing. My PC failed, and they

demanded I buy the product again to get a new license key. I declined.

Some months later, they went out of business...

What is the EAGLE hostID generated from? The motherboard? The hard

drive? The partition serial numbers? The network card MAC address?

If my network card, motherboard or whatever the HostID is based on

fails, do I need to buy a new license? These type of license policies

are very clearly profit-oriented and anti-consumer, and tells your

customers that you don't trust them.

The problem is two-fold:

• You are only allowed to install on 2 (which is pitiful!) computers if

you have a single user license.

• You cannot use a flexlm-based license for a single-user license.

 

• If your PC (or in the case of some license managers, your network

card) fails, you can't use the software and have to buy a new license,

or at least wait for a new license key.

• If your PC is stolen (very common for laptops), you lose one of your

two licenses...

• Some of us have more than one PC. I have a desktop in my office, an

SFF desktop in the lab, a netbook and a full-size laptop. So I'd have to

buy two separate EAGLE licenses (or a five-machine site license) just to

have enough "single user" seats to use EAGLE on all these machines, even

though I only use one at a time!

The combination of those two things means I can't duplicate the setup I

currently have, so this is the classic example of how proprietary

software owners can screw you over without you having any recompense or

workaround, despite you being a paying and loyal customer for an

extended period of time. I don't consider cracking the software to be an

adequate workaround.

 

So, if I'm going to have to spend $$$ in the thousands, I'll take a good

look at the competition first, and even at the freebies like kikad.

Kicad is starting to look really good - CERN have been putting a lot of

work in. I just don't like the lack of continuous forward/back

annotation (one of EAGLE's killer features).

A primary rule for any software "upgrade" is "don't break the existing

workflows". Eagle v7 is completely useless to me, not because of its

feature-set, not because of any price issues, but because the management

is being pants-on-head moronic about how it goes about licensing.

Licensing, of all things.

Agreed. Hierarchical design was one of the features I really wanted to

try (especially if I can reuse hierarchical design units), and I'd

gladly have paid the upgrade fee for it.

But with these licensing changes, I will not be upgrading, and I'll be

looking at competing products (of which there are many).

For corporate customers this probably won't be an issue (most of them

probably buy enough 'seats' to get a server-based floating license

anyway). But for hobbyists? This is going to be a deal breaker.

Thanks,

--

Phil.

philpem@philpem.me.uk

http://www.philpem.me.uk/

I'm not (and never have been) an Eagle user but this licensing horror is so familiar. I have at least 6 serious bits of licensed software and only one of them supports a dongle (one of the others does if you pay extra). All the others use these silly machine locked licenses with issues arising at every upgrade and if a computer should die etc etc.

At least the dongle can be moved about easily.

I sometimes feel I should give up on paying and just use a pirate copy with less hassle.

I thought it was generally agreed that it was silly restrictions on legal music downloads that gave piracy such a foothold - why do software companies insist on repeating the same mistake ?

Currently I use EasyPC from Number One Systems, cheaper than Eagle (much) and pretty good - never had any licensing issues.

MK

Am 19.07.2014 22:28, schrieb patweston:

snip

 

What really irks me is that installing 7.0.0 removed previous versions,

Can someone confirm that??

And what about a Cadsoft statement regarding it?

--

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / With best regards

Joern Paschedag

Can someone confirm that??

Not for me - I installed 7.0.0 to test it out, and have all my previous versions still there & licensed...

Am 21.07.2014 14:48, schrieb Colin O'Flynn:

Can someone confirm that??

Not for me - I installed 7.0.0 to test it out, and have all my previous

versions still there & licensed...

 

--

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Colin thank you for the answer.

I suppose he just overwrote ver.6  with ver.7,

otherwise.... oh boy...

--

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / With best regards

Joern Paschedag

I have an iMAC.

V6.6.0 was there, licensed and working. I installed V7.0.0, struggled unsuccessfully to instal the license, tried to launch V6.6.0, nothing happened. The folder was still there but only content was a bin folder with the eagle.key file. Nothing was overwritten, there is a separate folder for V7.0.0 with all the folders and files there, but is unusable.

Am 21.07.2014 17:43, schrieb patweston:

I have an iMAC.

 

V6.6.0 was there, licensed and working. I installed V7.0.0, struggled

unsuccessfully to instal the license, tried to launch V6.6.0, nothing

happened. The folder was still there but only content was a bin folder

with the eagle.key file. Nothing was overwritten, there is a separate

folder for V7.0.0 with all the folders and files there, but is unusable.

 

--

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Thank you patweston for the answer.

I hope to hear some others and perhaps one from cadsoft.

--

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / With best regards

Joern Paschedag

I have an iMAC.

 

V6.6.0 was there, licensed and working.

I'm on Win7 where the installer worked, so perhaps there's some issue with the Mac version or other issues with the installer.

On 7/21/2014 3:13 AM, Joern Paschedag wrote:

Am 19.07.2014 22:28, schrieb patweston:

 

snip

 

What really irks me is that installing 7.0.0 removed previous versions,

 

Can someone confirm that??

 

And what about a Cadsoft statement regarding it?

 

 

My guess here is that patweston is using a Mac. For some reason, I can't

comprehend like many things, the MacOS automatically uninstalls previous

versions of software when you install a new one. I'm not a hard core Mac

user, and someone more experienced than me can correct me on that but

that has been my experience.

EAGLE never automatically uninstalls by design.

hth,

Jorge Garcia

CadSoft Guest wrote:

 

On 7/21/2014 3:13 AM, Joern Paschedag wrote:

Am 19.07.2014 22:28, schrieb patweston:

 

snip

 

What really irks me is that installing 7.0.0 removed previous versions,

 

Can someone confirm that??

 

And what about a Cadsoft statement regarding it?

 

 

My guess here is that patweston is using a Mac. For some reason, I can't

comprehend like many things, the MacOS automatically uninstalls previous

versions of software when you install a new one. I'm not a hard core Mac

user, and someone more experienced than me can correct me on that but

that has been my experience.

 

It's just another screw-up on Cadsoft's part. The Mac (like any computer) only does what the software engineer tells it to. If your installer deletes old versions, it's not a "Mac" thing, it's a decision taken by the software engineer who wrote that software.

FYI, I have a Mac with

simon% ls -dl /Applications/EAGLE*

drwxr-xr-x  15 simon  admin  510 Oct 13  2011 /Applications/EAGLE

drwxr-xr-x  14 simon  admin  476 Jun  6  2012 /Applications/EAGLE-6.1.0

drwxrwxr-x  12 simon  admin  408 Oct  9  2012 /Applications/EAGLE-6.2.0

drwxrwxr-x   6 simon  admin  204 Aug 13  2013 /Applications/EAGLE-6.3.0

drwxr-xr-x  14 simon  admin  476 Dec 16  2013 /Applications/EAGLE-6.5.0

Clearly, each installation takes place in its own directory in /Applications. I haven't installed v7 because I've no intention of buying it - the brain-dead licensing being the sole reason.

Simon.

Am 19.07.2014 14:24, schrieb Michael Kellett:

In my experience dongles fail a lot less often than computers.

Yes. Lots of years ago, CadSoft DID use dongles (I think I remember

version 2.1 in the circuit board lab at University). These were then

cracked by 'The Electric Force Hamburg' (I think they were called), and

due to some clever crack detection tricks from CadSoft, the company even

found its way into some rather amusing press releases (amusing to me, at

least).

At my institute, I started working with EAGLE 3 (I think), using a

dongle connected in series to AutoCAD's dongle. I darkly remember always

having to switch on the printer before starting EAGLE or AutoCAD,

because otherwise, one of them would complain about 'dongle not found'...

Only AFTER CadSoft threw away the dongle (was it version 3.5?) did we

start buying licenses with MORE than one seat (yes, with the possibility

to copy illegaly, we PAID for more seats - probably because I'm stupid).

Otherwise, we would have needed to always mount/unmount dongles for use

with the other PCs of the same user (mainly office/lab at that time),

which nobody wanted to do.

Andreas Weidner

Am 21.07.2014 21:17, schrieb Jorge Garcia:

On 7/21/2014 3:13 AM, Joern Paschedag wrote:

Am 19.07.2014 22:28, schrieb patweston:

 

snip

 

What really irks me is that installing 7.0.0 removed previous versions,

 

Can someone confirm that??

 

And what about a Cadsoft statement regarding it?

 

 

My guess here is that patweston is using a Mac. For some reason, I can't

comprehend like many things, the MacOS automatically uninstalls previous

versions of software when you install a new one. I'm not a hard core Mac

user, and someone more experienced than me can correct me on that but

that has been my experience.

 

EAGLE never automatically uninstalls by design.

 

hth,

Jorge Garcia

At least not until now?

Thanks for your answer Jorge.

From being a long time user I know that eagle has sometimes problems

with  Mac.

Perhaps I should have mentioned that I am a win user (although if this

problem exist it concerns all eagle users) and maybe I hear some more

statements.

--

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / With best regards

Joern Paschedag

Am 21.07.2014 21:17, schrieb Jorge Garcia:

On 7/21/2014 3:13 AM, Joern Paschedag wrote:

Am 19.07.2014 22:28, schrieb patweston:

 

snip

 

What really irks me is that installing 7.0.0 removed previous versions,

 

Can someone confirm that??

 

And what about a Cadsoft statement regarding it?

 

 

My guess here is that patweston is using a Mac. For some reason, I can't

comprehend like many things, the MacOS automatically uninstalls previous

versions of software when you install a new one. I'm not a hard core Mac

user, and someone more experienced than me can correct me on that but

that has been my experience.

 

EAGLE never automatically uninstalls by design.

 

hth,

Jorge Garcia

At least not until now?

Thanks for your answer Jorge.

From being a long time user I know that eagle has sometimes problems

with  Mac.

Perhaps I should have mentioned that I am a win user (although if this

problem exist it concerns all eagle users) and maybe I hear some more

statements.

--

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / With best regards

Joern Paschedag